Entertainment reporter

Will Ferrell loved improv skit Written It Down by two Melbourne comedians

When two young Melbourne comedy producers got an email from Will Ferrell’s “people” in San Francisco, they dismissed it as spam.

Fortunately, Matt Saraceni took a second look. The email was legitimate, sent from the actual YouTube account of Ferrell’s hugely popular comedy website Funny or Die. The YouTube channel alone has 1.2 million subscribers, while the website - part-owned by renowned cable channel HBO - is one of the world’s top comedy sites.

And now the Funny or Die managers were asking Saraceni and his co-producer Dave Zwolenski if they could host their web-based improv comedy series Written It Down. The episodes - each lasting just a few minutes and filmed on a shoestring budget - had become a social media sensation after being picked up by Reddit, taking the number of views from 1000 to 40,000 in 48 hours.

Melbourne comics Matt Saraceni (L) and Dave Zwolenski are co-creators of the web comedy series Written It Down. Photo: Paul Jeffers

It was Zwolenski who attended the Skype meeting, carefully preparing his sales pitch. He was astonished, therefore, to find Ferrell’s people pitching to him.

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“They said they’d seen the number of hits,” Zwolenski says “and that the show was resonating with an American audience. Then they said, ‘Here’s our pitch: We want to take your show, feature it on Funny or Die and start building your brand.’ I’m just thinking, ‘This is the exact opposite of how I thought this would go.’”

By this point, Zwolenski had activated the voice recording app on his iPhone. He needed proof of this surreal moment for Saraceni.

It didn’t stop there. Their global audience ballooned thanks to Funny or Die’s support, giving them fans in Australia, the United States and Canada (and even a small viewership in Iran, according to Google Analytics).

Buoyed by their success, they entered the Fresh Blood competition, a joint venture between ABC and Screen Australia to help emerging comic talent. As one of 25 winners given a $10,000 budget, they’ve made a third season of Written It Down, to debut on iView in June.

But what exactly is this web series about?

It all started when the pair - who work as producers at Melbourne’s Nova 100 radio station - realised there were no “improv filmed formats that just let improvisers be improvisers”, according to Saraceni. Even TV programs such as SlideShow and Thank God You’re Here contain multiple prompts, keeping performers “on the rails”.

Written It Down simply involves two people in a cafe - or in Nova’s Melbourne headquarters in the second season - sitting opposite each other. All they know is the general scenario: that someone is about to get fired or dumped, for instance. Their only prompt is a single piece of paper containing a single sentence. (One man gets fired because he keeps comparing everything in the office to Game of Thrones; one guy dumps his boyfriend because he just doesn’t believe he’s gay.) The performers have no idea of the prompt until they open the piece of paper - and how the skit unfolds is entirely up to them.

Already, the episodes in the first two seasons have notched up a combined 110,000 views - particularly impressive given the first season was uploaded only late last year.

And in a moment of sweet surprise, one of the pair’s Nova colleagues came across a group of university students laughing over one of the videos - in a cafe in Texas.

“They were watching on an iPad,” Saraceni says. “That kind of reach is incredibly humbling, especially for a couple of guys who have gotten their mates together just because they think they’re genuinely talented.”

Indeed, they even have a photo of Ferrell himself enjoying Written It Down on a laptop.

“I believe he sits at home and watches every episode,” Zwolenski says.

“He’s actually really upset that iView is geo-blocked in America,” Saraceni adds. “He can’t see the third season.”

Having worked in most areas of media (Saraceni is a radio and television broadcaster and stand-up comedian; Zwolenski works across film, TV and radio and is best known for his documentary series Dave in the Life and Embedded with Sheik Hilaly); they’d love to create an improv-based sitcom. But world domination is not the goal. The most likely path to success, they believe, is doing what they most enjoy - not trying to satisfy the whims of an imagined mass market or corporate bosses. (The hands-off support of ABC and Screen Australia has allowed them to flourish, they argue.)

“I’ve done creative projects before: some go alright and some don’t go so good,” Zwolenski says. “You always hope people love what you do. But for me, this project came down to, ‘Let’s do something that we enjoy, that will make us laugh, regardless of what other people think and regardless if anyone else watches it.’ So I think it’s interesting that it has found an audience.”

“It blows my mind that all this has happened in less than a year,” Saraceni says. “It goes to show that if you make good entertainment, it will find an audience. The more that the people holding the purse strings can trust the passionate content creators to make something wonderful - and that trust guarantees they’ll put their heart and soul into making something brilliant - the more we’ll grow the next wave of amazing Australian performers.”